CHAPTER V
MARSEILLES
On the day of departure Berselius was entertained at déjeuner by the Cerele Militaire. He brought Adams with him as a guest.
Nearly all the sporting members of the great club were present to speed the man who after Schillings was reckoned on the Continent the most adventurous big-game hunter in the world.
Despite what Stenhouse, Duthil, and Schaunard had said, Adams by this time inclined to a half-liking for Berselius; the man seemed so far from and unconscious of the little things of the world, so destitute of pettiness, that the half liking which always accompanies respect could not but find a place in Adams’s mind.
Guest at a table surrounded by sixty of the wealthiest and most powerful officers of a military nation, Berselius did not forget his companion, but introduced him with painstaking care to the chief men present, included him in his speech of thanks, and made him feel that though he was taking Berselius’s pay, he was his friend and on a perfect social equality with him.
Adams felt this keenly. On qualifying first he had obtained an appointment as travelling physician to an American, a prominent member of the New York smart set, a man of twenty-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean shaved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men who make the great American nation so small in the eyes of the world—the world that cannot see beyond the servants’ hall antics of New York society to the great plains where the Adamses hew the wood and draw the water, build the cities and bridge the rivers, and lay the iron roads, making rail-heads of the roar of the Atlantic and the thunder of the Pacific.
This gentleman treated Adams as a paid attendant and in such a manner that Adams one morning lifted him from his bed by the slack of his silk pajamas and all but drowned him in his own bath.